September 27, 2012

Europe in Indian Strategy

India is in the midst of re-crafting and reinventing its relations with most
major states in the international system. While breakthroughs with the United
States over the past decade have had perhaps the greatest impact on Indian
strategy, the same period has also witnessed attempts at normalising relations
with China and Pakistan, an increasingly close relationship with Israel,
promising new partnerships with Japan and Brazil, and a reaffirmation of ties
with Russia. In this light, perhaps the least explored and least developed link
India has with a major centre of power, is with Europe. At the very least,
Europe appears to be playing a diminishing role in India’s strategic thinking,
despite its strong relations with individual countries: Britain, France and
Germany, in particular. Europe is often conspicuously absent in important
discussions of Indian grand strategy.

The recent EU-India summit of December 10,
2010 clearly highlighted the constraints present in New Delhi’s relationship
with Brussels. Unlike other recent summits involving India, the resulting joint
statement explicitly called upon Pakistan to bring the perpetrators of the 2008
Mumbai terrorist attacks to justice and promised greater cooperation on
terrorism, but contributed little else in strategic terms despite a wide
spectrum of shared interests. It is perhaps no surprise that the summit received
far less attention in the Indian media than the summits with the United States,
China, Russia and even individual EU member states such as France and
Britain.

Europe’s low profile in Indian strategic priorities is, at one level,
unusual. As a single entity, it mirrors India’s federal structure with its
culturally- and linguistically-distinct constituent entities. European states
also generally share India’s commitment to liberal democratic values and
multiculturalism. The European Union is India’s largest trade partner by some
distance. Britain and France are important defence suppliers to India’s armed
forces. And Europe is collectively home to an Indian diaspora that is over 1.7
million-strong and growing, albeit slowly.

The India-Europe link remains weak for several reasons, which can be broadly
grouped as: economic, politico-military, socio-cultural, and existential. There
have been disputes over disparate issues such as climate change, human rights,
and world trade. At the same time, both India and Europe have a history of
rising above such disagreements. While certainly not models of problem-free
relationships, Europe’s ties with China and India’s new found partnership with
the United States demonstrate the ability of both entities to forge fruitful
relations with leading powers despite deep-seated disagreements. In fact, the
failure of both India and Europe to take advantage of commonalities and surmount
their differences only betrays the strategic shortsightedness of policymaking at
both ends.